Unmasking Theatre Design

A Designer's Guide to Finding Inspiration and Cultivating Creativity

About the Book:

Every great design has its beginnings in a great idea, whether your medium of choice is scenery, costume, lighting, sound, or projections. Unmasking Theatre Design shows you how to
cultivate creative thinking skills through every step of theatre design--from the first play reading to the finished design presentation. This book reveals how creative designers think
in order to create unique and appropriate works for individual productions, and will teach you how to comprehend the nature of the design task at hand, gather inspiration, generate potential ideas
for a new design, and develop a finished look through renderings and models. The exercises presented in this book demystify the design process by providing you with specific actions that will
help you get on track toward fully-formed designs. Revealing the inner workings of the design process, both theoretically and practically, Unmasking Theatre Design will jumpstart the
creative processes of designers at all levels, from student to professionals, as you construct new production designs.

Named one of 5 Theater Books to Readby Backstage.com

Reviewed in TD&T (Theatre Design & Technology) Fall 2015:

"Porter shares a method that is firm enough for young design students seeking guidelines they can follow, yet allows space to find their own individual comfort zones."

"When students are faced with their first design project . . . how do they proceed? When they ultimately get stuck, how do they move forward? Why did they make the choices they
made? And are those choices valid? Unmasking Theatre Design tackles all these questions."

"Porter clearly demonstrates that it is important for students to understand that it takes patience and hard work to develop strong designs."

"Overall, Lynne Porter has written a welcome textbook that will guide many young designers of today, as well as encourage those of us who teach design to feel comfortable reassessing our own
classroom methods. We can use Unmasking Theatre Design as our guide. I certainly will."

What People are Saying:

"I have read other design books and, while they are valuable, [Unmasking Theatre Design] is the first that I read from start to finish. The language and topics flowed wonderfully
and I was fully engaged in what I was reading. I feel very strongly that [this] book is an asset to me as a designer and a resource that I will suggest to other designers in the future."